‘Why we won’t show rape on screen’
As series three nears, creator Chris Chibnall talks to Gabriel Tate about the ethics of his job – and about taking up the reins on ‘Doctor Who’
For a man who must be under intense pressure, Chris Chibnall is impressively sanguine. We’re in a corner office at ITV HQ, ostensibly to talk about the third and final series of Broadchurch, the 47-year-old writer’s phenomenally successful Dorset-set crime drama. Yet the night before, news broke that Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat’s last series before being replaced by Chibnall would also be Peter Capaldi’s own swansong as the Time Lord.
“You can imagine how delighted I was to face a journalist today,” says Chibnall between mouthfuls of porridge, before adding quickly, “I speak to Steven all the time, and I knew the announcement was coming. It’s a privilege being across two shows like this – a high-class problem.”
He relates all this very amiably, accommodating and cheerful even when stonewalling my more optimistic inquiries. But I can’t blame him for treading carefully. Doctor Who began seven years before he was born and will probably still be going after he’s gone. Broadchurch, though, is Chibnall’s baby, and series one was a bona fide sensation. The story of mismatched coppers Alec Hardy (David Tennant) and Ellie Miller (Olivia Colman, catapulted on to the A-list as a result) and their hunt for the killer of 11-year-old Danny Latimer won 10 million viewers, three Baftas, and a popular Twitter account for a slug that got squashed under Miller’s foot. Series two, addressing the trial of the accused – Miller’s husband, who eventually walked free – was, from one perspective, a flop, attacked for stunt casting, sloppy research and overstuffed storytelling. In fact, audience figures for the second series were identical, yet the enormous success of the first had created impossibly high expectations.
“Series two was a deliberate handbrake turn,” agrees Chibnall, “but the worst thing is when people don’t turn up to watch it. We took our audience with us, some of them kicking and screaming.”
Nevertheless, the opening episode of the third series, set three years on, feels like a response to the criticisms of the second – inadvertently so, Chibnall protests. It’s a careful, sensitive and compelling journey through the hours after Trisha Winterman (Julie Hesmondhalgh) has reported a rape. The research is front and centre, the narrative harrowing but unhysterical, and it operates almost as a three-hander between Hesmondhalgh, Colman and Tennant for the first half-hour. Only then do other characters, both familiar (local vicar Arthur Darvill, Danny’s estranged parents Andrew Buchan and Jodie Whitaker) and less so (farm shop workers Lenny Henry and Sarah Parish, Roy Hudd as Miller’s widowed dad), enter the story.
“I’d had the idea and everybody was up for it,” Chibnall explains. “Then we went away for several months, talking to the extraordinary people who work in sexual-assault support services, survivors, the people who investigate it… We asked them if Broadchurch was the forum in which to tell this story, and everyone said yes.”
It’s also, he asserts unhappily, a product of its time. With no national policy on supporting victims of rape, and support workers having to raise their own funds to run services, it’s no surprise that the rise in reported rapes (which has doubled since 2011) isn’t matched by a rise in convictions (only 7.5 per cent of cases reported to police). Misogyny and sexualisation of children, meanwhile, are worryingly resurgent. These issues have preoccupied Chibnall for some time. “The discourse on gender and sex has taken five steps back,” he says. “If you complain, you’re called oversensitive. The prevailing tone in the country is not kindness, and that has massive trickledown effects. The political landscape is much crueller and more confrontational. The mood of the country is set by its leaders and they are failing us by not setting a compassionate moral tone in a complex time.”
These failings are a particular worry to Chibnall as the father of two boys, aged 10 and 13. “Broadchurch is shot through with the fear of being a parent: what’s the most horrific loss you can imagine and how could you go on living afterwards? In a wider sense, I’m terrified about my kids coming down to breakfast and saying, ‘Trump said this and they’ve voted him president?’ How do you explain to your children how to behave as a man in this world? The world’s not quite making sense at the moment, and it’s all connected.”
It’s a situation television doesn’t always help, with women subjected to often graphic violence in far too many TV dramas, from Game of Thrones to The Fall. Not so Broadchurch, whose focus is on the aftermath of an attack that is never shown.
“As a programme-maker,” says Chibnall, “you’ve got a responsibility to examine your choices and how they play in the wider world. Does [violence against women] need to be shown? It’s difficult for me to speak about other shows, but I hope Broadchurch offers a thoughtful, compassionate, detailed, well-researched depiction of the emotional complexities of it. It’s not there as a plot device.”
Chibnall has been no stranger to scrutiny, ever since heading for television after starting out in theatre; his work as a playwright included Kiss Me Like You Mean It for the Soho Theatre, and he has made occasional returns to the form. His first series was in many ways the flipside of Broadchurch: Born and Bred was a typically cosy Sunday night comedy drama for the BBC, starring James Bolam as the head of a cottage hospital. Yet it was skilfully written and deftly played, running to four series and establishing Chibnall as a name to watch. Since then, he has showrun the silly, miscast Arthurian drama Camelot, been head writer on divisive Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood and written for its parent series six times.
In spite of these experiences, the move from occasional contributor to captain of the ship will probably see him both lionised and castigated on an entirely new scale. Both Capaldi and Moffat have been critically acclaimed, but controversial custodians of the Tardis have said Capaldi is too old and scary, Moffat too tricksy and smug. Unsurprisingly, Chibnall leaps to their defence.
“Peter was genuinely torn [about leaving],” he continues, “because it’s a part you don’t want to give up, and he’s been brilliant. His performance in [Moffat’s single-hander], Heaven Sent, was an absolute tour de force.”
Chibnall’s predecessor as showrunner, meanwhile, is “extraordinary. He’s such an incredibly detailed and precise writer. The breadth, surprise and density he’s brought to a popular Saturday night show… Steven’s mind is one of the great national treasures – you can talk about him in the same breath as Douglas Adams. I think he’s a bit under-appreciated, which is a mad thing to say about someone with two prime-time BBC One shows. You’re going to miss him when he’s gone!”
But go he will, at the end of a year that will see some big decisions for Chibnall. He says it’s too soon to have considered the specifics of casting a new Doctor, and in particular the debate over their gender or ethnicity. He adds, conveniently, that “if I told you now, I might change my mind”.
He does, however, offer an intriguing glimpse into his thought process – the Doctor will be treated like any other part. “We’ll cast the role in the traditional way: write the script, then go and find the best person for that part in that script. You couldn’t go out and cast an abstract idea. The creative possibilities are endless, but I have a very clear sense of what we’re going to do, without even knowing who’s going to play the part.”
I try another tack. With Colman a frontrunner to replace Capaldi (some seven years after Tennant himself vacated the Tardis) and Hesmondalgh having stated her interest, was he lobbied by the Broadchurch cast? “I can’t confirm or deny any calls, texts, emails or conversations I might have had,” he laughs, before relenting slightly. “I’ve just had the most hilarious text from an actor I worked with a long, long time ago. And no, I can’t tell you who it is…”
Thank goodness, then, for Broadchurch, after which secrecy and deflection have become second nature to Chibnall, whatever the toll on his shoe leather. “The first time I knew something was really happening with Broadchurch was when I rang to book a minicab and the guy said: ‘No problem, Chris, five minutes. Just tell me who did it.’ I stood firm, but I walked home.”
‘The Doctor will be treated like any other part: we’ll write the script, then go and try to find the best person’
Broadchurch returns on Monday February 27 at 9pm on ITV